Minnie Bruce Pratt – The Sound of One Fork

“when all that’s left of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds, when I get up and come in to fix supper, in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them.”

Billy Collins – Forgetfulness

“No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.”

Henri Cole – Twilight

“The mind is the most interesting thing to me; like the sudden death of the sun, it seems implausible that darkness will swallow it or that anything is lost forever there”

Alberto Ríos – When Giving Is All We Have

“We give because someone gave to us. We give because nobody gave to us”

CMarie Fuhrman – Anne

“What does this forty-nine-year-old heart understand about the mechanics of staying afloat, of netting a life and not letting go?”

James Crews – Self-Compassion

“How long do any of us really have before the body begins to break down and empty its mysteries into the air?”

Lucie Brock-Broido – Periodic Table of Ethereal Elements

“A girl ago, a girlhood gone like a vial of ether Thrown on fire—just A little jump of flame”

Maya C. Popa – Letters in Winter

“I see how winter is forbidding: it grows the heart by lessening everything else and demands that we keep trying. I am trying. But oh, to understand us, any one of us, and not to grieve?”

Laurel Blossom – Plea to a Potential Lover

“Lovers surprised by love, like us, make one mistake: they make too much of it, want the world to love them, and believe.”

Elizabeth Bishop – Sestina

“the little moons fall down like tears from between the pages of the almanac into the flower bed the child has carefully placed in the front of the house.”

Gwendolyn Brooks – Beverly Hills, Chicago

“Nobody is saying that these people do not ultimately cease to be. And Sometimes their passings are even more painful than ours. It is just that so often they live till their hair is white. They make excellent corpses, among the expensive flowers”

Kyle Lovell – The Sunken Cathedral

“you may spy the figure of the child, shining softly in the shadow of her sanctuary. Sleeping softly in the shadow of a sun-sunken cathedral.”